A clothes treating apparatus having a dry function, for example, dryer, may typically supply hot air into a drum in a state that drying objects are loaded within the drum being rotated to remove moisture. Hot air supplied into the drum is generated by applying heat obtained through the burning of fuels such as electrical resistance heating, gas or the like to air being supplied to the drum, but a heat pump may be used for the generation of hot air to reduce the energy consumption.
More specifically, high-temperature air being discharged from the drum may be cooled and condensed by exchanging heat with the evaporator, and air being supplied to the drum is heat exchanged with the condenser to generate hot air. When such a heat pump is used, the amount of heat being discarded during the exhausting or condensing process may be reloaded for the generation of hot air, thereby reducing the energy consumption to that extent.
The heat pump may be operated to implement a refrigerant compression cooling cycle while refrigerant is circulated, and in this case, air being heat exchanged with refrigerant while passing through the evaporator and condenser should be stably supplied to operate the cooling cycle in a stable manner. However, foreign substances such as lint contained in clothes may be mixed in the air being discharged from the drum, and such foreign substances may be adhered to a surface of the evaporator or condenser and thus become a cause of reducing a heat exchange efficiency between air and refrigerant.
To prevent this, a lint removal filter may be provided at a side of the upstream of the evaporator in the related art to minimize the adhesion of lint particles to a surface of the evaporator, but there is a limit in reducing a mesh size of the lint removal filter. As a result, it may be still impossible to remove lint particles having less than a mesh size and thus the adhesion of lint particles to a surface of the evaporator cannot be avoided when the filter is used for a long time. Moreover, foreign substances filtered by the lint removal filter may remain on a surface of the lint removal filter, thereby allowing a cause of preventing the flow of air.